Andrzej K. Kuropatnicki, “A little bit of beer is divine medicine”: medicinal properties of beer
Beer is one of the most consumed alcoholic beverages around the world, being rich in nutrients such as carbohydrates, amino acids, minerals, vitamins, and other compounds (e.g. polyphenols). Historically, beer has served as source of potent nutrient food and has been also used for its medicinal properties. It is not possible to say where and when the brewing of beer began, but the earliest historical records show its general use. In Sumer, beer was used for medicinal purposes as early as 2,000 B.C. In the early Middle Ages, rustic beers became popular among Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Germans, and Scandinavians. While rustic beers continued to be produced in homes, the art of brewing essentially became the province of monks, who brewed virtually all beer of good quality. Around the thirteenth century, hops became a common ingredient in some beers, especially in northern Europe. Hops were used as a medicinal plant, which, when mixed in beer, made “medicine that tasted good.” Many a time ale and beer were used as ingredients of various dishes in times when food was considered medicine. The aim of the paper is to present the history of beer used for its medicinal properties.
Pawel Hamera, “ A child with marasmus subsisted for three months on sweet whiskey and water alone, and ultimately recovered”: whiskey and its medicinal merits in the nineteenth-century press
From its beginnings whiskey, also known as ‘water of life’, was distilled for medicinal purposes and used to cure various maladies. It was considered to be able to make one healthy, stronger and courageous. As noted in an article published in Dublin University Magazine in 1875, it was customary in the nineteenth century to use alcohol to treat diseases and, by and large, therapeutic virtues of whiskey were not questioned. Whiskey played a significant role as a folk medicine and its healing qualities were propagated in ballads and folk songs. Even Father Theobald Matthew (1790-1856), the Apostle of Temperance, whose brothers owned distilleries, sent bottles of whiskey to hospitals during the cholera epidemic in the 1830s. Despite the fact that the members of the Temperance movement saw whiskey as something evil, they acknowledged its curative properties. Whiskey and its use in medicine as well as its merits were discussed in the press, both regular and medical. Moreover, whiskey was advertised in medical journals. The aim of this paper is to show how whiskey and its medicinal use were covered in the British and American press in the nineteenth century.
Polly Putnam, “Luxury rather than physic”: the medicinal uses of chocolate in the Stuart and Hanoverian royal courts
Recent research, undertaken as part of the restoration of King William III’s chocolate kitchens at Hampton Court Palace shows that chocolate had been imbibed medicinally at court since the reign of Charles II. This paper explores the early modern perception of chocolate as both a luxury good (and therefore dangerous) and a medicine by examining its use in the Stuart and Hanoverian Royal Courts. Studying chocolate in this royal setting provides an excellent lens through which the use of chocolate as medicine can be studied because accounts of both private medicinal consumption and public perception exist. Examination of the royal use of chocolate reveals a tension between both the luxurious nature of chocolate and its benefits, which is reflective of other new exotic goods introduced into England in this period. Contemporary accounts of the lives of the monarchs reveal the public perception of chocolate was, in general, that it was dangerous and often directly associated with a monarch’s death. The doctor’s accounts reveal an experimental approach: the efficacy of chocolate as medicine is ascertained through careful observation. Ultimately, Hans Sloane, physician in Ordinary to Queen Anne, through to George II resolved the tension between luxury and medicine, finding chocolate to be harmless and developing a luxury gift, often given to his fellow doctors.
Maciej Kokoszko, Bread as food and medicament in Oribasius’ writings
Treatises left by Oribasius (first and foremost his Collectiones medicae and Eclogae medicamentorum) preserve a vast body of information on varieties of bread eaten in late antiquity, characterise them from the point of view of dietetics, list medical conditions in which a given variety is especially beneficial and name medical preparations which include the product. The planned presentation will elaborate on Oribasius’ dietetic knowledge and his input into the development of dietetic discourse (his influence on Byzantine dietetic doctrine), determine Oribasius’ main sources on bread, characterize bread as food, list varieties which were thought to be used by physicians and explain reasons for the preferences, and exemplify cures and medical preparations which included bread.
Zofia Rzeznicka, Eggs as food and drug in the light of Oribasius’ medical treatises
Since Hippocrates it was adopted as a ruling medical theory that it was the proper diet, including the right foodstuffs, which were able to effectively cure human ailments. The doctrine was still in force in the 4th century, i.e. at the time when Oribasius served as emperor Julian the Apostates’ personal doctor and thereby the physician, in his works systematically alluded to healing properties of foodstuffs both as an element of curative diets or as a sui generis medicine itself. One of such foodstuffs were chicken eggs, which were given a detailed description as far as their nutritional values and medical properties were concerned. Moreover, they were often recommended as simple medicines as well as included in a high number of composed drugs. The planned presentation will demonstrate Oribasius doctrines on egg nutritional and therapeutic properties, exemplify main healing diets in which eggs were prescribed, specify most important cures which allow for the use of eggs, show the most frequently listed kinds of drugs produced on the basis of eggs, demonstrate sources of Oribasius’ competence in the above mentioned fields, and conclude on the doctors’ doctrinal originality or dependence on former authorities.
Giovanni Pozzetti, Meat and medicine in early modern England
Meat was considered one of the most important foods of all kinds. This argument recurs continuously from Galen to early modern authors because of its analogies with the human flesh. Despite its central role in diet, the early modern medical discourse on meat is controversial. Physicians and humanists argue about its grossness and inherent melancholic load, suggesting to reduce meat consumption to the minimum and giving advice to select and cook only specific parts of the animal. My paper illustrates early modern English medical perspectives around meat. It analyses to what extent doctors and literate people considered animal flesh and its derived as ingredients able to cure diseases. Both widely known and less famous authors are taken into account (Elyot, Boorde, Hart, Markham, Culpeper, Tryon, Cogan, Brooke and more). It is argued that despite its questionable medical reputation, meat played a crucial role in the construction of early modern English identity. In fact, social aspects of meat consumption often clashed against medical theories and advices. Given the central role played by meat consumption today in the public debate about food, a more nuanced understanding on how the flesh was thought in the past is more essential than ever.
Jane Hand, “Your health and the food you eat”: marketing margarine and visualizing health in post-war Britain
Within an historical narrative centred on the rise of epidemiological approaches to public health focussed on risk, behavioural change and lifestyle choice the role of the food industry in promoting food as healthy has been largely overlooked. Yet as issues of heart health became increasingly topical, food and diet were isolated as both significant risk factors for disease and important preventative agents. This paper will contextualise the advertising of food as health inducing within postwar British consumerism, focusing on Unilever’s Flora margarine as an important case study in legitimating the role of disease prevention as a marketing tool. I will discuss how, through a series of visual marketing campaigns, Unilever re-negotiated the institutional and cultural formation of food risk and responsibility. Adopting a language of self-care, advertisements constructed Flora as one important source of health authority within postwar consumerism. Their advertising focus on the lean male body as a central sales technique for a product with a very specific heart health claim ensured that these advertisements constructed specific ways of understanding eating in terms of disease prevention. Ultimately, this paper explores how this message was diffused and popularised within a visual consumer culture that represented certain foods as preventative medicine.
Mat Paskins, National rose hips: wild food and industrial medicine in 1940s Britain
During the early years of World War II, the staff of the Ministry of Food (MoF) received suggestions from a number of quarters that campaigns should be launched to collect rose hips, as an indigenous source of vitamin C. The rose hip campaign, and the syrup which was manufactured as a result, is a fairly well-known, appearing in popular memory and academic history and symbolising resourceful thriftiness and successful voluntary action. An examination of the negotiations, technologies, and forms of expertise recorded in the archives of the MoF, and of the Ministry of Health’s Vegetable Drugs Committee –under whose auspices the collection was organised--- reveals a more ambivalent and conflicted picture of how rose hips were treated first as food and then as medicine. Rose hips were meant to produce medicine on an industrial scale, and through industrial and scientific means, and several different views of the value and properties of the hips – which corresponded closely to different visions of ‘natural’ food and medicine which emerged in the aftermath of the war. Tracing this history also allows us to engage critically with the literature on wild food and medicine, with its focus on local and embodied knowledge.
Katrina Maydom, A taste of the exotic: the dangers and virtues of the “pineapple” in early modern England, 1550-1750
The pineapple makes an interesting case study for understanding how specimens from the ‘new world’ were understood in early modern English medical culture. Linguistically, its name holds many deep cultural connotations referring to the tree of life and resurrection in Christianity, the meaning of the word ‘pine’ itself to desire or waste away, and the foreign reattribution of the English pine tree and its cones and kernels’ name that had long been a staple of medical practice. The regal imagery of the pineapple’s crown, its presentation to Charles II, the adoption of its image in sculptures and later its natural form in Royal Gardens all influenced its social status. Thirdly, the pineapple is a prominent example of conditioning the environment with the introduction of hothouses or ‘pineries’ to grow pineapples locally in England, and the medical debate surrounding the suitability of foreign remedies for English constitutions and whether colonies were truly English lands. Finally, there are the vivid sensual descriptions of the colour and taste of the pineapple and its healing or poisonous properties. Through exploring these four ‘ways of knowing’, this paper contributes to the growing literature on the global circulation of naturalia and their associated medical knowledge.
Fabrizio Bigotti, Balancing mind and body in the early modern period
Since the time of the Hippocratic work De prisca medicina, diet and pharmacy were meant as the same thing: a balanced diet was the best way to prevent the onset of disease as well as a lasting life to the mankind. Furthermore, food was believed able to alter not only the inner constitution of human body but even his mind: as a part of the ecosystem, man could be affected by the same material elements that constitute the world as well as body. Through the doctrine of temperaments and, mainly, through Galen’s treatise Quod animi mores corporis temperamenta sequantuur, this idea spread into Medieval medicine, though it was only during the Renaissance that the model would have been fully recovered as an ideal proportion between physical beauty, moral virtues and readiness of mind. Ficino wrote his De triplici vita (Florence 1489) as a manifesto of a sort of medicine of soul, an attempt that was followed soon after by many others, especially in the medical field (the most important of which was Huarte’s Examen de Ingenios (Baeza 1575) aiming to improve the natural faculties of the mind by regulating food and sexual life. Eventually this approach would partly found a scientific base in Santorio Santorio’s work Ars de static medicina (Venice 1614) whose purpose was to investigate the effects of metabolism in everyday life by analysing the mathematical ratio between ingested food and physiological excretions. By approaching the theme, whose literature remains largely unknown still today, the aim of my report would be to illustrate the cultural outcome of the interplay between nutrition and soul at the edge of the Modern Era.
Ewa Geller, Yiddish ‘Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum’ from early modern Poland: a humanistic symbiosis of Jewish thought and Latin medicine
In my paper I wish to present an early modern Yiddish adaptation of the well-known European dietetic and medical regimen sanitatis salernitanum. The unique example of this book, printed in Poland in 1613, is to be found in the Austrian National Library in Vienna under the title Seyfer derekh eyts ha-khajim. This anonymous treatise written by a Jewish medical doctor reveals a remarkable symbiosis of the medical and religious ideas of the great Jewish philosopher and physician Maimonides and the typical occidental dietetic and hygienic rules propagated by the Latin genre regimen sanitatis. The presented Yiddish regimen sanitatis is an extraordinary example of the transfer and adaptation of scientific medical knowledge that crosses the boundaries of Jews and Gentiles. In this remarkable attempt, the unknown author, a former student of the renown medical school of Padua was certainly inspired by the humanistic spirit of that time. It is especially noteworthy considering the fact that the medical practices of Jews in Eastern Europe, from where the book originates, are considered to be particularly superstitious and obscure at that time. Seyfer derekh eyts ha-khajim is proof to the contrary and an analysis of the work challenges many widely held assumptions.
John Wilkins, Galen on food and good health, with a coda on his usefulness for Western societies
I will discuss two key claims in Galen. 1) Food and medicine are closely related. They are frequently the same substances, which if a food sustain the body and if a drug change the body. Galen implicitly concedes that foods can change the body to some extent, since all of his second book, on plants, notes no ‘nutritional’ value in such foods, in contrast to cereals, pulses and meat. 2) Galen has an impressive programme of preventive medicine in which his 6 ‘non-naturals’ maintain balance in the body. Food and drink are one of these, along with breathing, exercise, sleep, balancing the humours and mental health. We can thus see how a healthy life, with a good diet, can pre-empt much therapeutic intervention, a major message for the modern world, especially the EU and the USA.
Deborah Levine, Doctors “discover” diet: therapeutic diets for pregnant women, 1860-1940
Manipulation of diet is one of the oldest therapeutic tools available to physicians; diet, of course, was one of the six non-naturals that was a cornerstone element of Galenic medical theory. Historians have generally traced a rapid decline in dietetic medicine over the course of the long nineteenth century concurrent with the rise of biomedical models for understanding the body and disease. Because of this narrative, physicians who studied or successfully employed therapeutic diets for the treatment of disease in the late nineteenth or twentieth centuries are often represented in the historical, medical and popular literatures as “discoverers” or, less often, “rediscoverers” of diet’s role in medicine. This rhetoric of discovery obscures the many important aspects of continuity in scrutinizing diet amongst physicians and other health care providers. This paper will examine the phenomenon of dietetic discovery and the prominence of diet as a therapeutic intervention through the case study of diet advice to pregnant women made by physicians over the course of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Using case records, correspondence, and materials from professional medical literature, I demonstrate that many physicians were actively engaged with prescribing specific diets for their pregnant patients during this period. These diets, particularly the Prochownik and Karell (also known as "milk diet") diets, were rarely designed only to affect a more pleasant pregnancy; more often physicians were concerned with avoiding or alleviating specific conditions, ensuring better outcomes and improving the health of their patients. In short, diet was a tool in these physicians’ arsenals employed much the same way as they employed pharmaceuticals or even surgical interventions. Examining the prescription of specific therapeutic diets by physicians over the course of this period offers new insights on the role of diet in medicine, the history of obstetrics, and the ongoing “discovery” of diet amongst doctors in all specialties.
Juliana Adelman, ‘Sick room cookery’: medical ideas and home nursing in Ireland
This paper asks how medical ideas were translated into practices in the domestic sphere by looking at cooking for invalids. Examining the second half of the nineteenth-century up to the early twentieth century I try to determine how (or if) contemporary medical ideas were incorporated into household practices. The paper will make use of a combination of printed books, manuscript recipe collections, periodicals and household account books to look specifically at how medical ideas about sickness, health and diet affected the practices of feeding a sick member of the family. For example, can we see the impact of changing concepts of disease on the types of foods recommended for the sick? How much do folk traditions and older concepts of the body (such as humoral theory) continue to inform sick nursing in the period? Do new ideas about disease germs affect food preparation? How do new chemical ideas about food composition affect the foods offered to invalids? Are there significant differences between Ireland and Britain, Europe or America? Although there has been some recent work on the history of diet in Ireland and a growing body of literature on the history of medicine, the relationship between medical ideas and what actually happens in the home has been little explored. Examining ‘sick room cookery’ provides an opportunity to make this link and to relate the history of medicine to the growing interest in the history of food and cookery.
Michael Walkden, Diet and madness in early modern medical writing
This paper will examine the functional relationship between diet and sicknesses of the mind in early modern England. From the treatises of Timothy Bright and Robert Burton to the health manuals of Thomas Elyot, Thomas Tryon and George Cheyne, the relationship between food and the passions was an important and recurrent theme in early modern medical writing, blurring the lines between morality and medicine, doctor and patient, and body and mind. The paper will include an overview of diets suggested as causes or cures for madness, focussing on the physiological mechanisms that were thought to translate food, as external matter, into what we would now consider internal emotional states. I hope to show that, far from the free-floating, disembodied idea of emotion that has survived even the rise of modern neuroscience, early modern writers understood ‘states of mind’ in primarily materialistic terms. For many thinkers, to eat the flesh of a wild beast was to literally absorb its violent nature and disposition; conversely, drinking sheep’s milk imbued one with all the innocence and virtue of a lamb. For good or ill, food could have powerful effects upon an individual’s identity, and was both a medical and an emotional matter.
Martin Moore, Diet and “the diabetic life”: discipline and patienthood in British chronic disease management, c.1910-1980
Writing in the sixth edition of his renowned patient-practitioner handbooks for diabetes, R.D. Lawrence suggested in 1933 that ‘condemn[ing] the patient to weighing all his food…constitutes the essential difference between the normal and the diabetic life”. Whilst the creation of insulin therapy in the early 1920s had undoubtedly transformed diabetes care, Lawrence nonetheless placed meticulous, long-term dietary adjustment at the centre of a “diabetic creed”; rules for life that he felt newly chronic patients would need to master if they were to achieve metabolic balance, and secure a longer and healthier life. Using a mixture of medical publications and archived oral history testimony, this paper examines the changing basis of dietary management over the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, and examines the affect of programmes to change dietary behaviour in practice. Firstly, it highlights the way in which clinical approaches to dietary discipline were influenced not just by shifting bodies of social and natural scientific expertise, but also by other quotidian value systems, such as assumptions about class and gender. Chronic patienthood, in other words, was constructed in terms of scientific authority over the everyday, but articulated from particular social perspectives. Secondly, by contrast with the claims of this new medical management, the paper argues for recognising limits to this new discipline. Far from providing a foundation stone for expanding medical power into everyday life, attempts to shape patients’ relationship with food met a number of practical, material, and cultural obstacles. Patients and their lives, that is, proved resistant to practitioner intervention.
Ilaria Berti, Fresh food or dried food? The discourse on the food provisions of the British Army in the West Indies at the turn of the nineteenth century
The aim of this study is to examine the discourse on the food of the British army in the Caribbean in the late eighteenth-early nineteenth century. My main interest is to underline the increasing tension and oscillation between two opposite food consumption patterns: the doctors appointed by the British Empire to investigate the health of the troops proposed a diet based on fresh food that clashed with the meals provided by imperial authorities, consisting of dried and salted food. The sources used in this paper are medical reports written by doctors who moved from the United Kingdom to the West Indian colonies in order to examine the causes of high mortality among the troops. In the analysis of the conflict between the British doctors and the Empire, we will see that medical advice to change the diet of the army in the Caribbean was part of a larger plan to shape the lives and bodies of troops with the aim of maintaining and strengthening British imperial power.
Sam Goodman, “Here comes a barrel of beer at last!”: food and drink as medicine in the Indian Rebellion
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 occupies a central position in the mythology of late nineteenth-century British history. The traditional narrative is one of shock, and heroic resistance on the part of Anglo-Indian society, expressed through a medium synonymous with the British experience of India, that of the diary or journal. Along with the expected tales of bravery and courage, one of the defining tropes of these diaries is their obsession with food and drink. Using the printed and manuscript accounts of doctors and civilians written during the Siege of Lucknow in conjunction with medical publications of the period, the paper will examine how food and drink are key to the physical and mental health of the garrison, as well as to the examples of medical practice recorded in these texts. Far from simply a source of hardship, the lack of food and clean water come to represent deadly medical hazards in the form of scurvy, cholera and malnutrition, threatening the ability of the garrison to hold out until relief arrives. The paper will argue that far from a united front, these accounts reveal a medical community conflicted over the medicinal effects of food and drink, as well as the moral dangers of alcohol, within general diet and its use in treatment.
Lisa Haushofer, Between food and medicine: digestive physiology and “artificially digested foods”
In the late 19th century, approaches to healing with foods were significantly transformed through commercial foods that drew on scientific insight to lay claims to therapeutic benefits. Historians have explored how food chemistry changed understandings of the relationship between food and healing, and led to new kinds of dietary advice. The influence of physiology on conceptions of eating, as well as the role of commercial food products and their modes of preparation in cementing these conceptions, however, remain underexplored. In this paper, I examine how physiological research on digestive “ferments” (enzymes) inspired the creation of a group of commercial products for invalids called “artificially digested foods.” Focusing on the case of “Benger’s Food,” I argue that artificially digested foods communicated new understandings of digestion as external to the body through their materiality and recommended mode of preparation to consumers. At the same time, modes of preparation drew on traditional cooking processes and equated digestion with cooking, thereby naturalizing artificially digested foods. By paying attention to products and processes as communicators of scientific messages about food and medicine, my paper illuminates how the boundary between foods and medicines emerged as an unstable yet highly productive space in the late 19th century.
Beer is one of the most consumed alcoholic beverages around the world, being rich in nutrients such as carbohydrates, amino acids, minerals, vitamins, and other compounds (e.g. polyphenols). Historically, beer has served as source of potent nutrient food and has been also used for its medicinal properties. It is not possible to say where and when the brewing of beer began, but the earliest historical records show its general use. In Sumer, beer was used for medicinal purposes as early as 2,000 B.C. In the early Middle Ages, rustic beers became popular among Celts, Anglo-Saxons, Germans, and Scandinavians. While rustic beers continued to be produced in homes, the art of brewing essentially became the province of monks, who brewed virtually all beer of good quality. Around the thirteenth century, hops became a common ingredient in some beers, especially in northern Europe. Hops were used as a medicinal plant, which, when mixed in beer, made “medicine that tasted good.” Many a time ale and beer were used as ingredients of various dishes in times when food was considered medicine. The aim of the paper is to present the history of beer used for its medicinal properties.
Pawel Hamera, “ A child with marasmus subsisted for three months on sweet whiskey and water alone, and ultimately recovered”: whiskey and its medicinal merits in the nineteenth-century press
From its beginnings whiskey, also known as ‘water of life’, was distilled for medicinal purposes and used to cure various maladies. It was considered to be able to make one healthy, stronger and courageous. As noted in an article published in Dublin University Magazine in 1875, it was customary in the nineteenth century to use alcohol to treat diseases and, by and large, therapeutic virtues of whiskey were not questioned. Whiskey played a significant role as a folk medicine and its healing qualities were propagated in ballads and folk songs. Even Father Theobald Matthew (1790-1856), the Apostle of Temperance, whose brothers owned distilleries, sent bottles of whiskey to hospitals during the cholera epidemic in the 1830s. Despite the fact that the members of the Temperance movement saw whiskey as something evil, they acknowledged its curative properties. Whiskey and its use in medicine as well as its merits were discussed in the press, both regular and medical. Moreover, whiskey was advertised in medical journals. The aim of this paper is to show how whiskey and its medicinal use were covered in the British and American press in the nineteenth century.
Polly Putnam, “Luxury rather than physic”: the medicinal uses of chocolate in the Stuart and Hanoverian royal courts
Recent research, undertaken as part of the restoration of King William III’s chocolate kitchens at Hampton Court Palace shows that chocolate had been imbibed medicinally at court since the reign of Charles II. This paper explores the early modern perception of chocolate as both a luxury good (and therefore dangerous) and a medicine by examining its use in the Stuart and Hanoverian Royal Courts. Studying chocolate in this royal setting provides an excellent lens through which the use of chocolate as medicine can be studied because accounts of both private medicinal consumption and public perception exist. Examination of the royal use of chocolate reveals a tension between both the luxurious nature of chocolate and its benefits, which is reflective of other new exotic goods introduced into England in this period. Contemporary accounts of the lives of the monarchs reveal the public perception of chocolate was, in general, that it was dangerous and often directly associated with a monarch’s death. The doctor’s accounts reveal an experimental approach: the efficacy of chocolate as medicine is ascertained through careful observation. Ultimately, Hans Sloane, physician in Ordinary to Queen Anne, through to George II resolved the tension between luxury and medicine, finding chocolate to be harmless and developing a luxury gift, often given to his fellow doctors.
Maciej Kokoszko, Bread as food and medicament in Oribasius’ writings
Treatises left by Oribasius (first and foremost his Collectiones medicae and Eclogae medicamentorum) preserve a vast body of information on varieties of bread eaten in late antiquity, characterise them from the point of view of dietetics, list medical conditions in which a given variety is especially beneficial and name medical preparations which include the product. The planned presentation will elaborate on Oribasius’ dietetic knowledge and his input into the development of dietetic discourse (his influence on Byzantine dietetic doctrine), determine Oribasius’ main sources on bread, characterize bread as food, list varieties which were thought to be used by physicians and explain reasons for the preferences, and exemplify cures and medical preparations which included bread.
Zofia Rzeznicka, Eggs as food and drug in the light of Oribasius’ medical treatises
Since Hippocrates it was adopted as a ruling medical theory that it was the proper diet, including the right foodstuffs, which were able to effectively cure human ailments. The doctrine was still in force in the 4th century, i.e. at the time when Oribasius served as emperor Julian the Apostates’ personal doctor and thereby the physician, in his works systematically alluded to healing properties of foodstuffs both as an element of curative diets or as a sui generis medicine itself. One of such foodstuffs were chicken eggs, which were given a detailed description as far as their nutritional values and medical properties were concerned. Moreover, they were often recommended as simple medicines as well as included in a high number of composed drugs. The planned presentation will demonstrate Oribasius doctrines on egg nutritional and therapeutic properties, exemplify main healing diets in which eggs were prescribed, specify most important cures which allow for the use of eggs, show the most frequently listed kinds of drugs produced on the basis of eggs, demonstrate sources of Oribasius’ competence in the above mentioned fields, and conclude on the doctors’ doctrinal originality or dependence on former authorities.
Giovanni Pozzetti, Meat and medicine in early modern England
Meat was considered one of the most important foods of all kinds. This argument recurs continuously from Galen to early modern authors because of its analogies with the human flesh. Despite its central role in diet, the early modern medical discourse on meat is controversial. Physicians and humanists argue about its grossness and inherent melancholic load, suggesting to reduce meat consumption to the minimum and giving advice to select and cook only specific parts of the animal. My paper illustrates early modern English medical perspectives around meat. It analyses to what extent doctors and literate people considered animal flesh and its derived as ingredients able to cure diseases. Both widely known and less famous authors are taken into account (Elyot, Boorde, Hart, Markham, Culpeper, Tryon, Cogan, Brooke and more). It is argued that despite its questionable medical reputation, meat played a crucial role in the construction of early modern English identity. In fact, social aspects of meat consumption often clashed against medical theories and advices. Given the central role played by meat consumption today in the public debate about food, a more nuanced understanding on how the flesh was thought in the past is more essential than ever.
Jane Hand, “Your health and the food you eat”: marketing margarine and visualizing health in post-war Britain
Within an historical narrative centred on the rise of epidemiological approaches to public health focussed on risk, behavioural change and lifestyle choice the role of the food industry in promoting food as healthy has been largely overlooked. Yet as issues of heart health became increasingly topical, food and diet were isolated as both significant risk factors for disease and important preventative agents. This paper will contextualise the advertising of food as health inducing within postwar British consumerism, focusing on Unilever’s Flora margarine as an important case study in legitimating the role of disease prevention as a marketing tool. I will discuss how, through a series of visual marketing campaigns, Unilever re-negotiated the institutional and cultural formation of food risk and responsibility. Adopting a language of self-care, advertisements constructed Flora as one important source of health authority within postwar consumerism. Their advertising focus on the lean male body as a central sales technique for a product with a very specific heart health claim ensured that these advertisements constructed specific ways of understanding eating in terms of disease prevention. Ultimately, this paper explores how this message was diffused and popularised within a visual consumer culture that represented certain foods as preventative medicine.
Mat Paskins, National rose hips: wild food and industrial medicine in 1940s Britain
During the early years of World War II, the staff of the Ministry of Food (MoF) received suggestions from a number of quarters that campaigns should be launched to collect rose hips, as an indigenous source of vitamin C. The rose hip campaign, and the syrup which was manufactured as a result, is a fairly well-known, appearing in popular memory and academic history and symbolising resourceful thriftiness and successful voluntary action. An examination of the negotiations, technologies, and forms of expertise recorded in the archives of the MoF, and of the Ministry of Health’s Vegetable Drugs Committee –under whose auspices the collection was organised--- reveals a more ambivalent and conflicted picture of how rose hips were treated first as food and then as medicine. Rose hips were meant to produce medicine on an industrial scale, and through industrial and scientific means, and several different views of the value and properties of the hips – which corresponded closely to different visions of ‘natural’ food and medicine which emerged in the aftermath of the war. Tracing this history also allows us to engage critically with the literature on wild food and medicine, with its focus on local and embodied knowledge.
Katrina Maydom, A taste of the exotic: the dangers and virtues of the “pineapple” in early modern England, 1550-1750
The pineapple makes an interesting case study for understanding how specimens from the ‘new world’ were understood in early modern English medical culture. Linguistically, its name holds many deep cultural connotations referring to the tree of life and resurrection in Christianity, the meaning of the word ‘pine’ itself to desire or waste away, and the foreign reattribution of the English pine tree and its cones and kernels’ name that had long been a staple of medical practice. The regal imagery of the pineapple’s crown, its presentation to Charles II, the adoption of its image in sculptures and later its natural form in Royal Gardens all influenced its social status. Thirdly, the pineapple is a prominent example of conditioning the environment with the introduction of hothouses or ‘pineries’ to grow pineapples locally in England, and the medical debate surrounding the suitability of foreign remedies for English constitutions and whether colonies were truly English lands. Finally, there are the vivid sensual descriptions of the colour and taste of the pineapple and its healing or poisonous properties. Through exploring these four ‘ways of knowing’, this paper contributes to the growing literature on the global circulation of naturalia and their associated medical knowledge.
Fabrizio Bigotti, Balancing mind and body in the early modern period
Since the time of the Hippocratic work De prisca medicina, diet and pharmacy were meant as the same thing: a balanced diet was the best way to prevent the onset of disease as well as a lasting life to the mankind. Furthermore, food was believed able to alter not only the inner constitution of human body but even his mind: as a part of the ecosystem, man could be affected by the same material elements that constitute the world as well as body. Through the doctrine of temperaments and, mainly, through Galen’s treatise Quod animi mores corporis temperamenta sequantuur, this idea spread into Medieval medicine, though it was only during the Renaissance that the model would have been fully recovered as an ideal proportion between physical beauty, moral virtues and readiness of mind. Ficino wrote his De triplici vita (Florence 1489) as a manifesto of a sort of medicine of soul, an attempt that was followed soon after by many others, especially in the medical field (the most important of which was Huarte’s Examen de Ingenios (Baeza 1575) aiming to improve the natural faculties of the mind by regulating food and sexual life. Eventually this approach would partly found a scientific base in Santorio Santorio’s work Ars de static medicina (Venice 1614) whose purpose was to investigate the effects of metabolism in everyday life by analysing the mathematical ratio between ingested food and physiological excretions. By approaching the theme, whose literature remains largely unknown still today, the aim of my report would be to illustrate the cultural outcome of the interplay between nutrition and soul at the edge of the Modern Era.
Ewa Geller, Yiddish ‘Regimen Sanitatis Salernitanum’ from early modern Poland: a humanistic symbiosis of Jewish thought and Latin medicine
In my paper I wish to present an early modern Yiddish adaptation of the well-known European dietetic and medical regimen sanitatis salernitanum. The unique example of this book, printed in Poland in 1613, is to be found in the Austrian National Library in Vienna under the title Seyfer derekh eyts ha-khajim. This anonymous treatise written by a Jewish medical doctor reveals a remarkable symbiosis of the medical and religious ideas of the great Jewish philosopher and physician Maimonides and the typical occidental dietetic and hygienic rules propagated by the Latin genre regimen sanitatis. The presented Yiddish regimen sanitatis is an extraordinary example of the transfer and adaptation of scientific medical knowledge that crosses the boundaries of Jews and Gentiles. In this remarkable attempt, the unknown author, a former student of the renown medical school of Padua was certainly inspired by the humanistic spirit of that time. It is especially noteworthy considering the fact that the medical practices of Jews in Eastern Europe, from where the book originates, are considered to be particularly superstitious and obscure at that time. Seyfer derekh eyts ha-khajim is proof to the contrary and an analysis of the work challenges many widely held assumptions.
John Wilkins, Galen on food and good health, with a coda on his usefulness for Western societies
I will discuss two key claims in Galen. 1) Food and medicine are closely related. They are frequently the same substances, which if a food sustain the body and if a drug change the body. Galen implicitly concedes that foods can change the body to some extent, since all of his second book, on plants, notes no ‘nutritional’ value in such foods, in contrast to cereals, pulses and meat. 2) Galen has an impressive programme of preventive medicine in which his 6 ‘non-naturals’ maintain balance in the body. Food and drink are one of these, along with breathing, exercise, sleep, balancing the humours and mental health. We can thus see how a healthy life, with a good diet, can pre-empt much therapeutic intervention, a major message for the modern world, especially the EU and the USA.
Deborah Levine, Doctors “discover” diet: therapeutic diets for pregnant women, 1860-1940
Manipulation of diet is one of the oldest therapeutic tools available to physicians; diet, of course, was one of the six non-naturals that was a cornerstone element of Galenic medical theory. Historians have generally traced a rapid decline in dietetic medicine over the course of the long nineteenth century concurrent with the rise of biomedical models for understanding the body and disease. Because of this narrative, physicians who studied or successfully employed therapeutic diets for the treatment of disease in the late nineteenth or twentieth centuries are often represented in the historical, medical and popular literatures as “discoverers” or, less often, “rediscoverers” of diet’s role in medicine. This rhetoric of discovery obscures the many important aspects of continuity in scrutinizing diet amongst physicians and other health care providers. This paper will examine the phenomenon of dietetic discovery and the prominence of diet as a therapeutic intervention through the case study of diet advice to pregnant women made by physicians over the course of the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Using case records, correspondence, and materials from professional medical literature, I demonstrate that many physicians were actively engaged with prescribing specific diets for their pregnant patients during this period. These diets, particularly the Prochownik and Karell (also known as "milk diet") diets, were rarely designed only to affect a more pleasant pregnancy; more often physicians were concerned with avoiding or alleviating specific conditions, ensuring better outcomes and improving the health of their patients. In short, diet was a tool in these physicians’ arsenals employed much the same way as they employed pharmaceuticals or even surgical interventions. Examining the prescription of specific therapeutic diets by physicians over the course of this period offers new insights on the role of diet in medicine, the history of obstetrics, and the ongoing “discovery” of diet amongst doctors in all specialties.
Juliana Adelman, ‘Sick room cookery’: medical ideas and home nursing in Ireland
This paper asks how medical ideas were translated into practices in the domestic sphere by looking at cooking for invalids. Examining the second half of the nineteenth-century up to the early twentieth century I try to determine how (or if) contemporary medical ideas were incorporated into household practices. The paper will make use of a combination of printed books, manuscript recipe collections, periodicals and household account books to look specifically at how medical ideas about sickness, health and diet affected the practices of feeding a sick member of the family. For example, can we see the impact of changing concepts of disease on the types of foods recommended for the sick? How much do folk traditions and older concepts of the body (such as humoral theory) continue to inform sick nursing in the period? Do new ideas about disease germs affect food preparation? How do new chemical ideas about food composition affect the foods offered to invalids? Are there significant differences between Ireland and Britain, Europe or America? Although there has been some recent work on the history of diet in Ireland and a growing body of literature on the history of medicine, the relationship between medical ideas and what actually happens in the home has been little explored. Examining ‘sick room cookery’ provides an opportunity to make this link and to relate the history of medicine to the growing interest in the history of food and cookery.
Michael Walkden, Diet and madness in early modern medical writing
This paper will examine the functional relationship between diet and sicknesses of the mind in early modern England. From the treatises of Timothy Bright and Robert Burton to the health manuals of Thomas Elyot, Thomas Tryon and George Cheyne, the relationship between food and the passions was an important and recurrent theme in early modern medical writing, blurring the lines between morality and medicine, doctor and patient, and body and mind. The paper will include an overview of diets suggested as causes or cures for madness, focussing on the physiological mechanisms that were thought to translate food, as external matter, into what we would now consider internal emotional states. I hope to show that, far from the free-floating, disembodied idea of emotion that has survived even the rise of modern neuroscience, early modern writers understood ‘states of mind’ in primarily materialistic terms. For many thinkers, to eat the flesh of a wild beast was to literally absorb its violent nature and disposition; conversely, drinking sheep’s milk imbued one with all the innocence and virtue of a lamb. For good or ill, food could have powerful effects upon an individual’s identity, and was both a medical and an emotional matter.
Martin Moore, Diet and “the diabetic life”: discipline and patienthood in British chronic disease management, c.1910-1980
Writing in the sixth edition of his renowned patient-practitioner handbooks for diabetes, R.D. Lawrence suggested in 1933 that ‘condemn[ing] the patient to weighing all his food…constitutes the essential difference between the normal and the diabetic life”. Whilst the creation of insulin therapy in the early 1920s had undoubtedly transformed diabetes care, Lawrence nonetheless placed meticulous, long-term dietary adjustment at the centre of a “diabetic creed”; rules for life that he felt newly chronic patients would need to master if they were to achieve metabolic balance, and secure a longer and healthier life. Using a mixture of medical publications and archived oral history testimony, this paper examines the changing basis of dietary management over the first three-quarters of the twentieth century, and examines the affect of programmes to change dietary behaviour in practice. Firstly, it highlights the way in which clinical approaches to dietary discipline were influenced not just by shifting bodies of social and natural scientific expertise, but also by other quotidian value systems, such as assumptions about class and gender. Chronic patienthood, in other words, was constructed in terms of scientific authority over the everyday, but articulated from particular social perspectives. Secondly, by contrast with the claims of this new medical management, the paper argues for recognising limits to this new discipline. Far from providing a foundation stone for expanding medical power into everyday life, attempts to shape patients’ relationship with food met a number of practical, material, and cultural obstacles. Patients and their lives, that is, proved resistant to practitioner intervention.
Ilaria Berti, Fresh food or dried food? The discourse on the food provisions of the British Army in the West Indies at the turn of the nineteenth century
The aim of this study is to examine the discourse on the food of the British army in the Caribbean in the late eighteenth-early nineteenth century. My main interest is to underline the increasing tension and oscillation between two opposite food consumption patterns: the doctors appointed by the British Empire to investigate the health of the troops proposed a diet based on fresh food that clashed with the meals provided by imperial authorities, consisting of dried and salted food. The sources used in this paper are medical reports written by doctors who moved from the United Kingdom to the West Indian colonies in order to examine the causes of high mortality among the troops. In the analysis of the conflict between the British doctors and the Empire, we will see that medical advice to change the diet of the army in the Caribbean was part of a larger plan to shape the lives and bodies of troops with the aim of maintaining and strengthening British imperial power.
Sam Goodman, “Here comes a barrel of beer at last!”: food and drink as medicine in the Indian Rebellion
The Indian Rebellion of 1857 occupies a central position in the mythology of late nineteenth-century British history. The traditional narrative is one of shock, and heroic resistance on the part of Anglo-Indian society, expressed through a medium synonymous with the British experience of India, that of the diary or journal. Along with the expected tales of bravery and courage, one of the defining tropes of these diaries is their obsession with food and drink. Using the printed and manuscript accounts of doctors and civilians written during the Siege of Lucknow in conjunction with medical publications of the period, the paper will examine how food and drink are key to the physical and mental health of the garrison, as well as to the examples of medical practice recorded in these texts. Far from simply a source of hardship, the lack of food and clean water come to represent deadly medical hazards in the form of scurvy, cholera and malnutrition, threatening the ability of the garrison to hold out until relief arrives. The paper will argue that far from a united front, these accounts reveal a medical community conflicted over the medicinal effects of food and drink, as well as the moral dangers of alcohol, within general diet and its use in treatment.
Lisa Haushofer, Between food and medicine: digestive physiology and “artificially digested foods”
In the late 19th century, approaches to healing with foods were significantly transformed through commercial foods that drew on scientific insight to lay claims to therapeutic benefits. Historians have explored how food chemistry changed understandings of the relationship between food and healing, and led to new kinds of dietary advice. The influence of physiology on conceptions of eating, as well as the role of commercial food products and their modes of preparation in cementing these conceptions, however, remain underexplored. In this paper, I examine how physiological research on digestive “ferments” (enzymes) inspired the creation of a group of commercial products for invalids called “artificially digested foods.” Focusing on the case of “Benger’s Food,” I argue that artificially digested foods communicated new understandings of digestion as external to the body through their materiality and recommended mode of preparation to consumers. At the same time, modes of preparation drew on traditional cooking processes and equated digestion with cooking, thereby naturalizing artificially digested foods. By paying attention to products and processes as communicators of scientific messages about food and medicine, my paper illuminates how the boundary between foods and medicines emerged as an unstable yet highly productive space in the late 19th century.